Great Harry

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

  Even more irritating was the fact that Marie was handed over to Henry's strapping ^Jnsouc iant nephew, whose sexual arrangements were as disorderly as those of his aging mother Margaret. James's fragile French wife Madeleine had died after only six months of Scots cheer and Scots weather; Marie might well succumb to the same contagions. In any case Henry was expected to welcome her into the family with avuncular generosity, and he began to receive importunate letters from his sister asking for money and "silver work" to use in preparing for the wedding. Henry declined to send either, but received unbidden assurances from Margaret afterward that all had gone well, and that James and his new bride had "great love between them."^^

  Rather than lament the loss of Marie de Guise, Castillon told Henry, he ought to take comfort from the fact that she had two sisters. One of them, Renee, was said to be the beauty of the family but was intended for the religious life. The remaining girl, Louise de Guise, seemed perfect. A Scotsman who had seen both Louise and Marie pronounced the former to be "the most beautiful creature that he ever saw," and the French ambassador underscored this impression. Louise was not only lovely and graceful, bred to please and obey the man she married, she was a virgin besides. "Take her," Castillon advised lasciviously. "She is still a maid; with her you will be able to shape the passage to your measure." Henry laughed at this, and clapped Castillon on the shoulder. Then, still smiling over the ambassador's earthiness, he dismissed him "with a good countenance."^'*

  It was in September of 1539, when the immediate danger of invasion from the continent had passed and all pending marriage negotiations had cooled, that final arrangements were made to provide a fourth wife for the king. It was to be as much a match with a principality as with a woman.

  The duchy of Cleves, whose Rhineland territories bordered the Hapsburg Netherlands, offered great strategic value in any future conflict between Henry and Charles V. The duke, whose full title was **William, Duke of Juliers, Gelders, Cleves and Berg, Count of Marchia, Zutphania and Ravensburg, and lord in Ravenstein," had recently come into possession of Gelderland, a region disputed by the emperor and a particular irritant at this time of political turbulence in the Low Countries. Cleves was also a prime recruiting ground for the much-sought-after German mercenaries who formed the core of most sixteenth-century fighting forces. Duke William was not a Lutheran but had close ties with the German Protestants whose aid Henry had solicited without success in recent years; though outside the Schmalkaldic League himself he was the brother-in-law of the Lutheran elector of Saxony and was closely connected to Philip of Hesse, both men leading members of the League.

  Duke William's sister Anne seemed to fit Henry's personal requirements nearly as well as her brother fit his political ones. At twenty-four she was neither too young nor too old for him; though lacking the linguistic and musical attainments common among wellborn Englishwomen she was intelligent and capable of learning; of a gentle and undemanding nature, she was accustomed to a quiet life of needlework and gentility in the company of a rather strict and hovering mother.^^ There seemed no reason to doubt her fitness for motherhood. To Henry she appeared to be "of convenient age [and] healthy temperament" to bear him children, and he hoped they would produce sons together.

  Prince Edward was now nearly two years old. and "one of the prettiest children of his age that could be seen anywhere." He had stood alone on his sturdy legs long before he was a year old, and would have walked, a visitor wrote, if his nurse had let him. Like his father he was good-natured yet shrewd, with "so earnest an eye as it were a sage judgement towards every person that repaireth to his grace."^^ The little prince was a continual comfort to his father, yet both the king and his subjects wished there were more sons; there were even some among the people who questioned Edward's right as heir on the grounds that Jane Seymour had not had a coronation. And as always there was the danger that the prince might die from a childhood disease or plague or as a result of some darker force. In 1538 a porter at the University of Oxford told of seeing a waxen replica of Edward—a doll used in sympathetic magic— with a knife through its heart.^'

  Of the health and nubility of Anne of Cleves there was no doubt, but her looks were another matter. The earliest ambassadorial descriptions were not only favorable but flowery. "Every man praises the beauty of the lady," Henry's envoy Christopher Mont wrote from the court of Cleves, "as well for the face as for the whole body, above all ladies excellent." Anne was said to excel the duchess of Milan, the beauty of all Flanders and Henry's particular favorite, "as the golden sun did the silver moon."^* Yet until she became the object of Henry's attention Anne had never been spoken of as a beauty; candid appraisals had been less than flattering. English envoys sent to provide a fuller description came away

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  uncertain. They had been allowed to interview both Anne and her sister Amelie, yet the "monstrous habit and apparel" in which the women were swathed hid their faces and disguised their figures.^^

  Holbein's portraits dispelled all doubts. He painted Anne and Amelie with his customary fidelity to feature and expression; the portrait of Anne seems to have satisfied Henry, for within weeks of its arrival in August negotiations with the Clevan representatives were under way, and by early October the marriage treaty had been drawn up. A slight shadow hung over the match. Anne had at one time been promised to a son of the duke of Lorraine, and the English negotiators had to make certain this did not stand as an impediment to her marriage to Henry. By October 6 they were convinced, and the treaty was signed at Hampton Court.

  The next two months were taken up with hurried preparations for the reception of the new queen. She would travel overland to Calais, then cross the Channel to Dover, it was decided. Her overanxious mother was concerned that a sea journey in winter might "alter her complexion," not to mention her health, and there was always danger from pirates and from the imperial fleet. In Flanders news of the betrothal was already bringing angry threats. It was widely believed there that Henry had actually promised his throne to the duchess of Milan. If he intended to break his promise, the Flemish insisted, they would at least see to it "he should never enjoy the sister of the duke of Cleves."^^

  The English accepted the coming of the king's German bride without demur, and the townspeople of Dover and Canterbury and Rochester set to work planning official receptions for Anne when she passed through on her way to London. At Henry's court the nobles and gentlewomen sent for large quantities of cloth of gold and silk, and ordered their gowns for the wedding and coronation. Painters and plasterers were brought in to repair and decorate Hampton Court, especially the queen's apartments, and to make it a honeymoon palace once again.

  The task of ordering Anne's household and providing for her large German retinue fell to Cromwell, who was only too pleased to smooth the way for an alliance he had worked untiringly to promote. The number of the new queen's English and German servants, the ordering of their liveries, the assigning of their beds and their places at table occupied him more and more as the day of Anne's arrival approached. And he had the unenviable task of sifting among all the requests for places in Anne's establishment from the women of the court. There could be only so many ladies in waiting and privy chamber women and maids of honor; for every petitioner Cromwell was able to satisfy he had to disappoint several others.

  The immediate challenge was to work out the arrangements at Calais, where a large company of English courtiers would meet the Clevans coming from Antwerp. Lodgings had to be procured for all the hundreds of visitors, and halls and kitchens rented for them to eat in. How much of the cost the king would bear was unclear—but until that was decided he had to send money across the Channel in advance to secure space in the houses and inns, and to begin the bargaining with innkeepers and stew-

  ards. Where the English party was concerned no detail escaped his notice, not even the provision of dishes and napkins and tablecloths. The Germans were a different problem. There were to be
some three hundred and fifty of them, including nearly a hundred of Anne's personal servants (her gentlewomen and household officers and their pages, her cook, physician, chaplain and secretary) and an escort of notables and ambassadors. There were thirteen trumpeters and "a man who plays upon two things as drums of a strange fashion." All of these people had to be looked after at least temporarily, though the majority of them were to return to Cleves once Anne was safely in English hands.^^

  Anne set out from Diisseldorf and made her way slowly to Antwerp, where the English merchants of the town, arrayed in velvet coats and heavy gold chains, rode out to greet her.^^ From there she traveled to the coast and down along it until, early in the morning of December 11, she and her party entered the English Pale. A military escort met them there, the officers of the Calais garrison and town, the captains of the adjoining fortress of Rysbank and of the newly formed King's Spears, and a contingent of liveried royal archers. Another welcoming party of a dozen English lords and nearly three hundred gentlemen and yeomen wearing the king's colors of red and blue rode up to the travelers a mile out of Calais, and as they led them into the town all the cannon boomed out again and again in greeting. The ships in the harbor too shot off their guns, the largest of them, the Lion and the Sweepstake, making "such a smoke that her train could not see one another."^^

  Anne and her retinue stayed in Calais for more than two weeks waiting for a favorable wind to cross to England. Though the weather was poor, jousts were held in her honor (while waiting for Anne to arrive the younger English knights had spent their time jousting for their own amusement), and in the evenings there were banquets and games. Thomas Wriothesley, lord admiral, taught Anne to play a card game that Henry liked, and perhaps she learned a little English as well. Overall she adjusted quickly to the strangeness of her surroundings and her new English companions. She was dignified without being haughty, amiable yet not overly familiar. Perhaps she felt at once the particular liking for the English she was later to show so strongly. "Her manner was like a princess," Wriothesley wrote to Henry, who was becoming impatient to see his fiancee. Lady Lisle described Anne as "good and gentle to serve and please," and wrote reassuringly to her daughter at Hampton Court that she and the other gentlewomen would have a good-natured mistress.

  Finally two days after Christmas the crossing was made, amid stormy seas and driving rain. Another splendidly clad delegation was waiting to meet the visitors when they landed at Deal, and to ride with them to Dover and then on to Canterbury. The weather seemed to grow more foul each day, and Anne had to shield her complexion against heavy winds and hailstones. Her good spirits held up nonetheless. When after a long, wet day she was conducted to her chamber at Canterbury she found some fifty women of the town in velvet bonnets waiting for her there, and offering her service. "All which," Suffolk wrote to Cromwell, telling him to pass

  the news on to the king, '*she took very joyously, and was so glad to see the king's subjects resorting so lovingly to her, that she forgot all the foul weather and was very merry at supper."^'^

  At Greenwich Henry read each of the letters about Anne again and again, pacing the floor in vexation. Their formal meeting was five days away. How could he wait that long? Since mid-December he had been "not a little desirous" to have Anne by his side; now he found the waiting intolerable, especially since Suffolk had written that she too was "desirous to make haste" to join him.

  At last, too restless to wait another hour, he made up his mind to act. Anne was to arrive at Rochester on New Year's Eve. He would surprise her there on New Year's Day, bursting in on her as in his youth he had burst in on Katherine and her maidens, disguised as Robin Hood. When she recovered her composure they would laugh together, and he would kiss her and give her gifts—sables for her neck and throat, and a furred muffler and cap.^^

  On New Year's Eve Henry and a few companions dressed themselves in modest coats and caps of gray velvet, and set off on their romantic errand. Henry rode hard for the coast, eager to see his bride at last, eager, as he confided to Cromwell before he left, "to nourish love."

  You husbands, match not but for love Lest some disliking after prove.

  It was after noon on New Year's Day when Henry and his party rode up to Rochester Abbey and dismounted in the courtyard. After riding so far the king must have been weary—he rode so rarely now that his stables had sadly declined—but he hardly paused to catch his breath before making his way to the rooms where Anne was lodged and walking in, unannounced. There she was, the woman compared to the sun in beauty, the face and form Holbein had ennobled with his lifelike portraiture. There she stood in the flesh, her tall body less than pleasing in its stiff, old-fashioned German robes, her complexion more brown than white, her face more regal than maidenly, with a shrewd and determined set to her features that did not promise obedience.

  Henry caught his breath, "marvellously astonished and abashed," a companion wrote, by what he saw. He was thoroughly taken aback, but good manners forced him to go up to Anne and embrace her, and to give her a chaste kiss of welcome. His "discontentment and misliking of her person" could hardly be hidden, though, and after the briefest of conversations—excusably brief, given Anne's linguistic limitations—he left as suddenly as he had come.

  Probably that first meeting was enough to make Henry rue his betrothal. By the time Anne reached London two days later he could think of nothing but how to free himself. He made no secret of his dissatisfaction with Anne, telling John Russell, who went with him to Rochester, that "he saw no such thing in her as hath been showed unto him of her." He "liked her not," he told Russell plainly, and looked "sore troubled" as he said it.^ It was equally clear to Suffolk that Henry "liked not the queen's person," and that he wanted nothing more than to be free of his obligation to her. To Cromwell, the man chiefly responsible for bringing Anne to England, Henry was blunt. Had he known beforehand what he knew now, he told the lord privy seal, she would never have set foot in England.^

  Others besides Henry judged that Anne's attractiveness had been overrated. The French ambassador Marillac wrote candidly that she was "tall and thin, of middling beauty, with a determined and resolute countenance." She looked to be about thirty years old (well advanced in years for a sixteenth-century woman), and was on the whole a good deal less handsome than the English had been led to believe. The rather

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  plain-featured waiting maids she brought with her only enhanced her unloveliness. They were scarcely admired by the English crowds that came to see the queen, but then they wore such "coarse and unsightly garb," Marillac conceded, "that they would be considered ugly through it even had they any personal attractions."^

  Apparently Anne's German upbringing left her somewhat unpolished in courtly manners; one of her English waiting women. Lady Browne, confided to her husband that the king would find his new wife too uncultured to tolerate. "She saw in the queen such fashion and manner of bringing up," she said, "so gross that in her judgement the king should never heartily love her."'* It was no wonder Henry felt misused as well as misled by his advisers. In a reflective moment he mused on the injustice of arranged marriages. The state of princes, he lamented, was far worse than that of poor men who could at least choose their wives for themselves.^

  For the moment Henry gave no public sign that the wedding plans were being reconsidered. He carried out the elaborately formal welcoming arranged for Anne at the foot of Shooter's Hill near Greenwich, riding across Blackheath with a spectacular escort of six thousand attendants, "with marvellous silence and no confusion," to meet her. He was still an awesomely commanding figure on horseback—though it took a much stronger horse to carry him now—and as always he dressed for the crowd, his massive form outlined in jewels of incomparable size and brilliance. His coat of purple and gold was fastened with "great buttons of diamonds, rubies and Orient pearl"; around his neck he wore a collar of pearls and huge rubies; his sword and sword belt were ornamented with sparkling emeralds, and his bonnet and ni
ghtcap (worn because of the freezing weather and, perhaps, to hide his baldness) were "so rich of jewels that few men could value them."

  Anne too was splendidly attired in a costly gown of cloth of gold, with a pearl-trimmed bonnet on her head and around her neck and chest "a partelet set full of rich stones which glistered all the field." She and her gentlewomen had been awaiting the king in a large golden pavilion, warmed inside with braziers and made sweet-smelling with incense and perfumes. As Henry approached she came into view at the door of the tent, mounted her palfrey and rode toward him accompanied by her footmen wearing the black Hon of Cleves on their liveries. With "most lovely countenance and princely behavior" Henry took off his bonnet and saluted Anne, embracing her warmly "to the great rejoicing of the beholders." Then they rode together off the field, flanked by the merchants of the city, the lord mayor and aldermen, the bishops and nobles, the ladies and gentlewomen in their ranks.

  At Greenwich Henry bade Anne "welcome to her own," their arrival at the palace marked by a great peal of guns, but as soon as he had left her at the door of her chamber he began a last-minute effort to forestall the wedding. He summoned Cromwell and ordered an immediate meeting of his privy councilors and the envoys of the duke of Cleves. The solemnization of the betrothal might be prevented on two grounds: either that the German envoys failed to bring an official commission from the duke

  authorizing them to conclude the legalities of the marriage, or that they could not provide written evidence that Anne's prior betrothal to the duke of Lorraine's son had been formally revoked. Both questions were raised at the Council meeting, and the Germans, "much abashed," had to admit that they could not produce the required documents. They offered to send for them, however, and Henry, realizing that at best this tactic could only postpone and not prevent the dreaded union, did not press the issue.